Meet Avicii, the £12m hit-maker behind the most streamed song ever

Avicii started out making catchy melodies in his bedroom in Stockholm. Then it all went Pete Tong. The godfather of house signed him up, but the trappings of life as a globetrotting DJ led to a champagne problem and two stints in hospital. Simon Mills meets the teetotal crowd-pleaser producing the biggest hits on the planet

Earls Court on a Friday night in February. Among an eye-socking pyrotechnic orgy of lasers, fireworks, flame belchers and steroidal PC screensavers, a 24-year-old Swede in a John-Boy Walton flannel shirt and a backwards baseball cap is twiddling knobs, faders, CD decks and a MacBook Pro. As a nod to the London crowd, the streak of bumfluff and drainpipes that Forbes magazine lists as the world’s sixth highest-earning DJ drops a medley of what he calls ‘site-specific’ tunes — Underworld’s ‘Born Slippy’, Arctic Monkeys’ ‘Do I Wanna Know?’, some bits of Candi Staton’s ‘You Got the Love’ — but it’s his own stuff, the jump-and-fist-pump hits, that really take the roof off: the zithery synth of ‘Levels’, the country-tinged ‘Wake Me Up’ (the fastest-selling single of 2013) and the cheesy Euro-house refrains of ‘Hey Brother’. Avicii mouths the lyrics like a teenage fan, conducts the tunes like François Truffaut’s character in the climactic scene of Close Encounters. There are 18,000 people going hands-in-the-air, girlfriend-on-their-shoulders nuts. It is all over by 10.30pm.

When I head backstage I join the squarest, politest after-party in music business history. Klaxons star James Righton (Mr Keira Knightley), rave legend James Barton (of superclub Cream fame) and Avicii’s Canadian model girlfriend Raquel Bettencourt mill around a charisma-free holding room, talking and drinking coconut water. A 50in TV in the corner is freeze-framed on a boring bit of Avicii’s pre-gig Grand Theft Auto session. Feeling crazy, I ask for a beer. Avicii’s (real name Tim Bergling, stage name ‘the lowest level of Buddhist hell’) press officer, the wonderfully named Tony Tambourine, looks at me blankly: ‘A beer? We might have one somewhere…’ When somebody finally locates a few bottles, Bergling refuses: ‘I don’t drink any more.’ In January 2012 he spent 11 days in a New York hospital suffering from acute pancreatitis, and there was a six-day spell in a Brisbane hospital last March with ‘stomach-related issues’. Too much alcohol, champagne mainly, would certainly not have helped. He may earn up to £150,000 a gig but the price to pay was a burnout in his early twenties that nearly cost him everything before he’d even really started.

‘I was young, just starting out, getting into it all,’ he says wistfully. ‘Having fun. Drinking became routine for me, but it’s impossible to keep up touring and drinking at the same time, because you are going to crash. Especially when you are playing 320 shows a year.’

Did excessive drink ever affect his performance? ‘Oh, sure. I messed up, had the sound die on me. It’s really embarrassing.’ But isn’t it weird to be straight when everyone around you is going bonkers and you are the person at the centre of the party? ‘I actually feel better now. When I decided to stop drinking, it changed everything for the better, made things more professional.’

Ultimate professionalism is essential now as the EDM (electronic dance music) phenomenon continues apace, from clubs to festivals, across musical genres in charts. Thanks to ‘Hey Brother’ and ‘Wake Me Up’, Avicii has even won the ears of country and western fans. In modern parlance Avicii isn’t just a DJ, he’s an ‘artist DJ’. A gig like Earls Court isn’t a rave, it’s ‘a DJ concert’ and Avicii needs to perform like a frontman. ‘It’s something I’ve had to work at,’ he says. ‘It is kind of awkward, just standing there. People want to see something. I don’t practise a routine and I never watch footage of my performances doing all those crazy hand movements. That would be… uncomfortable.’

When he’s on tour, Bergling tells me he likes to get up at 8am ‘to check out the venue’. At 11pm, he looks ready for bed. We discuss Disclosure, the twenty-something EDM duo from Reigate, Surrey currently tearing up the US. ‘Everyone loves Disclosure,’ he agrees. And they are even younger than you are, I say. Suddenly, Bergling looks very much awake again. ‘Are they?’ he says, wide-eyed and

panicked. ‘Are they really?’ But he still has a few years on the world’s top-earning DJs: in reverse order, David Guetta, 46, earned £18m last year; Tiësto, 45, earned £19m and Calvin Harris, 30, earned £28m. Being a top-flight DJ is big business. Bergling shows me his watch, a solid gold Rolex Daytona. He talks about his £8.5m LA mansion, which, as internet rumour has it, is called Casa Bettencourt after his girlfriend. It’s empty most of the time.

Bergling was born in 1989 (the same year that your reporter attended his first acid house rave) and grew up in Stockholm. His mother is the actress Anki Lidén, who starred in the Oscar-nominated film My Life as a Dog. His dad is into Ray Charles. He has an older brother and sister who are into rock music. As a kid, Tim’s favourite band was Kiss.

Did he do well at school? ‘I had, I guess, around a 50 to 60 per cent attendance rate,’ he says breezily. ‘I skipped a lot of lessons. At night I was on the computer or out… doing stuff. I always had a hard time waking up and getting to school. I think that’s why this job suits me so well.’

Stockholm, he says, is a handsome and civilised place to live ‘but not much goes on there. It’s great for calming down or hanging out in the studio but there aren’t many people on the streets. The darkness and the cold make you hibernate and definitely contribute to the way that people stay in and use their computers.’

And that’s what he did. Brought up on the stadium-filling tunes of Swedish House Mafia, Eric Prydz and Tiësto, teenage Tim stayed in his room ‘producing’ his own music, starting with a remix of the theme music for the Commodore 64 game Lazy Jones. A club promoter, Ash Pournouri, saw his stuff on YouTube and encouraged him to practise. Hard.

In April 2008, Avicii released his first track, ‘Manman’, on Pete Tong’s Bedroom Bedlam label before he’d ever DJed in front of a club crowd. ‘I spotted Avicii through a talent competition I ran on my podcast Pete Tong TV back around 2006/7,’ says Tong, now a neighbour of Bergling’s in LA. ‘I hadn’t met him at the time. It was all done online and over the phone. He was a fan, really; not even old enough to go clubbing. His influences came from music he heard on the radio or found online or in record stores in Stockholm. Clearly he had a very strong talent for constructing a melody and showed great maturity in the way he put a track together. A natural. My only regret is that I didn’t sign him on a longer deal.’

Bergling got offers from big clubs but turned them all down, choosing instead to turn in incognito performances. ‘I wanted everything to be perfect. I didn’t want to mess up.’ His first DJ shows proper were not exactly small-time. He started opening for Tiësto, Guetta, Tong — all men in their forties and older. What did they think of this young kid showing up in the booth? ‘There is a kind of age-related safety-net thing going on with DJing. It doesn’t really matter how old you are. If you are good and still killing it, you can carry on having a career. It’s not like being a pop star who has one hit then disappears. Because you are basically playing other people’s records, there’s a mutual support system going on. So, if someone puts out a single, all the other DJs support it, help each other out. That’s why I felt that no one ever looked at me like I was competition. I am friends with almost every other DJ… I hope.’

After the ‘party’ I walk across the deserted, bottle-strewn acres of a cold and rainy Chelsea lorry park, heading to Bergling’s tour bus. He wants to talk some more.

Unsurprisingly, the bus is drink-, drug- and girl-free, and Bergling is on his computer. An Apple laptop screen illuminates the tired-looking but puckishly pretty-boy face (which Ralph Lauren chose to front its Denim & Supply jeans ads). His concentration is trance-like as his fingers move across the keyboard at the warp speed of a jonesing IT man.

‘Sorry. If you can wait a minute… I just have this tune in my head and I need to get it down before I forget.’ Watching from a squeaky leather banquette, sitting between a sink, a fridge and a wall-mounted telly, beneath blue and red disco lighting, I get a massive, fabulously tweetable, blow-up-the-internet exclusive: Avicii, who has worked with Madonna and Lenny Kravitz, the geeky Swede whom not even One Direction could knock off the number one spot last summer, is writing his next hit song. Right in front of me.

The melody coming from the mini speakers sounds plinky-plonky, almost puerile, but Bergling keeps trimming and honing, adding notes and beat-matching, turning the laptop to show me the Tetris visuals of the FL Studio programme. After five minutes, something approaching the top line of a hit emerges.

It’s impressive but somehow all too easy, too convenient to be what the old fart in me would call ‘real music’. ‘Listen,’ he says. ‘I don’t consider myself “a musician”. Yes, I can play guitar, I can play piano; in fact, I play almost every instrument. I was never good enough to perform with a band… but I always knew about melody. I could vision for how I wanted things to sound. And I don’t think you can say that what I do, what DJ producers do, is not “real music”… it’s electronic music. You are drawing the melodies, drawing the chord progressions. You are making music. Mozart wrote everything down on a piece of paper. DJs write on computers. I really don’t see any difference.’

There’s a pause. ‘I’m not comparing myself to Mozart, by the way…’ You just did.

The album True is out now; ‘Addicted to You’ is out on 7 April. Avicii headlines EDC UK on 12 July